Adobe launches redesigned Lightroom for Android

Tuesday

Adobe launched an update for its Lightroom photo management and editing apps on iOS and Android today. The iOS app for iPhone and iPad is getting a few new features, including support for Adobe’s selective brush, a new details tab and an interface update for the iPad version. That’s all pretty nice, but the biggest news here is that Adobe also completely redesigned the Android app from the ground up.

Adobe has long been an iOS-first shop and, while it now offers most of its apps on Android, too, it often felt as if the teams spent far more time polishing the iOS apps than the Android versions. Lightroom on Android was always a pretty competent mobile version of the desktop experience, but it never felt all that snappy and native.

“We wanted to provide the best Android experience possible so we redesigned Lightroom for Android from the ground up to be faster, more efficient, and, well, more Android-y,” Adobe says in today’s announcement. “Every screen has been redesigned with the goal of ensuring a natural, native Android experience while providing the highest quality, professional-grade mobile photo editing app ever.”

Sadly, new features like Selective Brush, which complements the currently available linear and radial gradients, and the Detail tab that gives you global control over sharpening and noise, are still coming to iOS first. Chances are we’ll have to wait a little bit longer to get these on Android.